Melinda Gates on Paid Leave, Gender Disparities at Work, and #MeToo: 'I Get That Men Are Scared'

A little over two yeas ago, Glamour asked Melinda Gates, cofounder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, what kind of headline she'd write to sum up progress for women over the past 25 years. Her answer? "Amazing Progress and Also Still Some Gaps." Since then, she's been pushing hard to fill those gaps, pledging to get 225 million women access to birth control by 2020, advocating for paid family leave, and trying to change the bro-topia culture of Silicon Valley. Today she and husband Bill released their Tenth Annual Letter, a sort of update on their work at the Gates Foundation and always a glance at their pure optimism about the world. This year's letter focuses on the toughest questions they've been asked over the years. Glamour editor-in-chief Samantha Barry added a few more to the list—and she opened up about how she discusses #MeToo with her own family, and why she'll never stop pushing for reproductive rights for women.

SAMANTHA BARRY: Back in 2015 Glamour asked you what headline you would write to describe the progress women have made in the last 25 years. You said: 'Amazing Progress but Also Still Some Gaps.' What is the headline that sums up women for the last three years for you?

MELINDA GATES: "Women Are Getting Their Voice More and More and More Around the World." And that can only lead to good things. So I am super optimistic about where women are headed [but]…I am also impatient. I want it to happen faster.

SB: Right. There is so much data that shows that if a workplace is more inclusive and has more women, it is more profitable. But there are so many industries and boardrooms that still seem like a boys' club. You say you want it to happen quicker—why do you think it is not happening as quickly as it should? What’s the holdup?

MG: We’re trying to break societal norms. The hardest thing to do is break old societal norms. So you have industries like venture capitalism—a perfect example in the United States, where it’s not regulated at all. And so the boys' club exists, and they are not willing to break it open themselves. And so to me, it is [about] the lost opportunities. You have all of these ideas that we don’t even know about that are laying around unfunded. You don’t have women at the table; you don’t get that set of diverse ideas. And my biggest concern, to be frank, is when you look at where we’re going with AI machine learning. [If] you bias those systems now, [and then] you want to try and unbreak that 25 years from now, good luck! The facial recognition that is just come out, 99 percent of white men are recognized and [the number drops to] 35 percent if you’re a black woman, are you kidding me? Think about the inherent bias in all of our systems if you don’t have women and minorities at the table. So we’re trying to break societal norms and that is hard to do. It is not impossible, but it’s hard.

SB: You’ve made efforts in particular when it comes to investing in V.C.s that are backed by women.

MG: I’m just starting to.

SB: Tell us about that.

MG: Let me give you the reason why I got there. My voice, my attention, and my focus will always be on women around the world, but…you want to talk about women not having [been] empowered yet, not having access to capital—it is women in the developing world. But as I would go on these trips—because I travel a lot to the developing world; I just got back from West Africa—I would have to ask myself, but what about us in the United States? I’d have to turn the question back to myself and say, 'How far are we?' I just see these places in the United States where we are not far enough yet: Congress, venture capital, women going into STEM careers. And so if we don’t move those pockets forward, we’ll end up with even more gaps and biases. So I’ve gotten very interested in how you work on some of those systemic issues. I am just starting now in the V.C. space. [Gates recently made a significant investment in Aspect Ventures, a female-led V.C. company.] I want to open that up so women and minorities have access to capital so all of their great ideas can come forward and we can sift through them and decide which ones are good business ideas and opportunities.

SB: That is good to know! So one of the biggest conversations we’ve been having here in the U.S. and around the world is around #MeToo. You’ve got three children—two daughters and a son. Have you had open conversations with your son about #MeToo? Have you talked to your daughters about it?

MG: How I talk to my son and my daughters about it is the same. My son actually let me write a piece about a year ago on his birthday, when he turned 18, about him being a feminist. He said, "Absolutely I’m a feminist, Mom." We have a discussion about this at our dinner table all the time. Our oldest daughter is off in college, so she’s not always at the dinner table, but on vacation she is. And they help inform us about what is going on in the schools, what’s needed, what they read about, even how do you take a different angle on maybe what seemed acceptable years ago—"Mom, when you were in college"—is not acceptable now. My son literally says that is just not acceptable! So they help you see how the world is changing and where it needs to go.

SB: In the conversations I’ve had with the men in my life about #MeToo, what stuck out for me is that a lot of them were very surprised about how pervasive it was. Was Bill surprised at the extent of what was happening?

MG: Yes, quite frankly he was at the beginning! But again, as I started to share more of my own stories around this, or of women I knew that he knew, and would say, "Look, these are the things they faced out in industry." …[And] he would say, "Wow, really? Wow!" It’s pervasive, and one of the bright lights coming out of the #MeToo, to me, is that we’re getting transparency. We’re not done yet. There has to be full transparency, but the only way to change societal norms goes back to that. You have to have open public transparency about things and then commitment to changing it. Until you have that, you don’t get change. I don’t care whether you’re in a village in Africa or whether you’re in New York City. That is how societal change happens. So I think even having men who are for women—I am surrounded by many men who are for women, but it’s been a reckoning for them.

Men are scared and we need to not shy away from that. We have to figure out, OK, what do you do about it?

MG: I was so glad Sheryl [Sandberg] came out with that piece. We contributed too. I have lots of friends who are in many different industries that I keep up with. And one of my friends came up with this very early. She’s in the architecture field, and she said, "You know it is going to be terrible if the thing that comes out of this is separate men's and women’s groups. That would be the wrong way to go." And so when you see what’s going on, I get that men are scared, right? But what you have to do is figure out what are the right ways to engage? What are the right ways to engage at work in the social hours, at lunchtime, at the coffee breaks, at dinners? There is a way to do this. I’m sure you all go to healthy settings with men and have great business conversations. I certainly have during my career, many great ones. And then you have someone whose aren’t so great. So I think getting people to realize, "OK, these are ways to interact." Maybe, for a while, men and women [work] together [in groups], there are safety in numbers, right? Also it’ll help if both men and women will call out the man who's acting improperly. As sad as [it is that men are hesitant to mentor women], I am glad that it is coming out. Men are scared, and we need to not shy away from that. We have to figure out, OK, what do you do about it?

You have to have open public transparency about things [like #MeToo] and then commitment to changing it. Until you have that, you don’t get change. I don’t care whether you’re in a village in Africa or whether you’re in New York City.

SB: Turning to women in tech in particular: Women in computer-related fields have declined since 1991, from 36 percent to 16 percent—you’ve been very vocal about this. Why have the numbers gone down in tech, even though the women in fields like medicine is climbing?

MG: I was literally in college when things peaked and came down the other side. And we don’t know exactly why it happened. I’ve looked at a lot of the data that exists. But the surmise is that when the industry became very gaming-focused, it drove women out of it and women weren’t interested in being in it anymore. Shoot-’em-up games—we know women aren’t attracted in general to those kinds of games. So that was one factor. The other was the inherent bias that was already in the system. So we know that women are uncomfortable in systems where they run up against bias over and over again and they are not supported by other women. Even when I was in computer science—in 1982 to 1986—[during] my freshman year, there were lots of women in my courses. It wasn’t equal, but there was enough. [By] sophomore year I could’ve counted on one hand the number of women in my classes. So then you’re not surrounded by like-minded people. Even today, in the tech industry, you see that when women go into a company, they look for other groups inside of a big tech organization where there are other women because they just feel more supportive and more comfortable. I think that because of the inherent bias in the system that already existed, women just started to drop out more and more and more. We didn’t cross that hump that got enough women in and wanting to stay.

SB: How do you reverse that?

MG: Well, we do a bunch of things. You have to make investments in the K through 12 level. And you are starting to see some change there. The fact more girls are taking that AP computer science test now—that is a good sign that the right investments are being made. I think the number-one thing we need to do is create pathways into tech for women that aren't the traditional tech pathways. We know when beginning freshman courses with computer science are welcoming to a woman—it is not all math and theoretical, it has real-world problems in it—she goes, "Hey, I am interested in it." And her chance of staying in it then, not only staying in the first course, but going onto a second course, is much higher. So there are a bunch of universities that are playing with that first entry-level course and figuring out how to make it welcoming to everybody, how to make it the most popular course on campus.

SB: You said to Wired in 2016 that after the presidential election is over, “I look forward to a real family leave policy coming forward.” How do you suggest we move forward under the Trump administration?

MG: Well, I’m glad the discourse is still very much alive on paid family leave. And it is under this administration. The good news is [that] it’s not maternity leave. It is paid family leave—it has the word paid in it and it has family in it. That is really important. If you don’t have family in it, then you genderize it, and if you don’t have paid, then we get stuck with the old policy that was passed during the Clinton administration. Everybody who passed that policy thought it was just a first step, but it’s taken us 25 years now to get back and discuss paid family leave. So I am glad that the discussion is open. [Marco] Rubio has put forward a proposal; Kirsten Gillibrand has put forward a proposal. I think there is some work to be done on both of those, and they’ve got to come together. But just the fact that it’s a live conversation and we might actually get a bill either under this administration or the next, that is very important.

[The global gag rule] caused chaos in the field…. When you don’t give access to contraceptives to women, you’re leaving them in a life of destitution and poverty. That’s just it. We know that.

SB: Sticking with politics…you’ve been a huge advocate for reproductive health services, and you’ve said in the past that moving away from providing contraceptives because of political controversy in our country is “just a crime.” Under this administration, the global gag rule has been reinstated, and the results have been devastating: International Planned Parenthood estimates that the lost funding could’ve prevented 20,000 maternal deaths, and then there’s estimates that 2 million women globally will lose their contraception. How do we get back from such a setback?

MG: And those are the low estimates. We knew the Mexico City policy was going to come back [under] this administration—it always comes back on during a Republican administration. [The Trump administration applied] it extremely broadly, the most broad it’s ever been on before. It covers over $8 billion dollars of U.S. funding, and the rules around it took a long time to be clarified. So it caused chaos in the field. But when you don’t give access to contraceptives to women, you’re leaving them in a life of destitution and poverty. That’s just it. We know that. We have to fund it.

SB: In your annual letter Bill said one of the things you’ve been asked most about is the Trump administration, and you wrote that [you] wish our President would treat people, and especially women, with more respect when he speaks and tweets. This seems particularly relevant this week since there’s been a lot of conversation around the White House—how they may have looked the other way when they learned staffers were accused of domestic violence. What policies or actions do you think they could’ve taken? How does that make you feel that this is part of the national conversation?

MG: I think the U.S. president needs to role-model values for the world. Children, girls or boys, look up and say, "I want to be president one day." So there should be no place for disparaging discourse. They should be leading, not following. And we’re talking about, how do you create a twenty-first-century workforce that is welcoming to everybody, no matter the skin color or gender? And the fact that this administration is not only not leading on that; they are still stuck on a 1970s workforce—it just doesn’t make sense to me. I think it doesn’t make sense to a lot of kids in the United States. They are scratching their heads and saying, "That is what we are putting out there as our American values?" That’s just very discouraging.

SB: You’ve spoken a lot in the past about how important it is to invest in grassroots women’s organizations. In 2017 and 2018 there's a swell of women either getting into local politics or the midterms. There is just an energy around women getting involved in community, whether that be true activism or grassroots organization. What have you seen that you’ve been most excited about?

MG: I am so excited about women stepping up and getting into politics. We see 80 women running for governor right now in our country. We see more than 50 women saying they’re going to run for Senator. We see several hundreds saying they are going to run to be in the U.S. House of Representatives. That is fantastic because we’ve got to get more women in those institutions who are making policy and putting bills forward, deciding on funding. Those are the seats of power. And that is what changes society. The fact that women are rising up and saying, "I am going to take this into my own hands." In my own backyard, there is a woman physician who is running for office. She’s got two young kids. Her career path was to be a doctor! That is what she thought she was going to be, but she’s so upset by what she is seeing in the discourse and what is actually happening in the United States that she said, "I’m going to run for office." I think that is exactly what we want. If that is the outcome of the Women’s March, that is phenomenal. It’s a total win.

It takes those three things: voice, decision making, and financial means. When [women] have that, you don’t stop them.

SB: So right now less than 2 percent of global funding for gender issues goes to local women’s organizations. What do you think desperately needs funding right now in this moment?

MG: What desperately needs funding is what helps women get their voice truly empowered, because we know empowered women change societies. And you see it all the time in rural Africa. I see it in rural India; I see it in New Delhi; I see it in New York City—that when women have their voice, they can make a decision and they have financial means. It takes those three things: voice, decision making, and financial means. When they have that, you don’t stop them. That’s why when I see women in rural India who band together and have their voice and a little bit of decision-making authority, even if they don’t have too much economic means but a little bit, they will band together and they will demand their rights. They will say, "We deserve to have a health clinic in our village," or they’ll call the police and say, "You need to come and investigate this rape that happened." That is women’s empowerment. And that is what changes things.